RSS Feeds Should Contain Full Posts

Published 4 years, 10 months ago in publishing + content

I firmly believe RSS feeds should contain the full text of an entry and here is a good answer to those of you who might be asking “Why?”.

If you really, really, really want people to see your great web design, you�re flattering yourself; content is king. If you didn�t believe that the content is the important part of your site, you wouldn�t be providing an RSS feed. Bite the bullet and give us full text.

10 Responses to “RSS Feeds Should Contain Full Posts”

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1 Richard Mulholland Jan 16th, 2004 at 1:40 am

I couldn’t agree more mate…!
2 Jeremy C. Wright Jan 16th, 2004 at 7:32 am

k, so teach me… I’ve upped the settings in MT to be 3000 characters, but formatting and linebreaks still aren’t transferred so it looks awful.

If you have any tips drop me an email
3 jason Jan 16th, 2004 at 10:34 pm

Ah, but if you’re attempting to make money via advertising, it’s pretty hard to drain all your traffic away. Even adding RSS ad items seems pretty risky.

For regular blogs, though, i agree it’s the way to go.

-jason
4 Richard Soderberg Jan 17th, 2004 at 5:39 am

My interest in blogs is not purely graphical aesthetics; in fact, it is heavily weighted on the side of plain old text.

I grew up reading books and computer screens, and then text files, and then the web; in every case, the formatting also never went so uncorrectably wrong that the content was hidden from me.

I do think that RSS should contain the full article from a website. It would do wonders for communication, and there’s one current side effect: I see the site every time I post a comment.

That’s the golden key, that can’t be faked: saying things people feel like replying to. It does mostly good to your position to publish yourself over as many media outlets as possible (as discovered by Clear Channel and Disney); in the end, your message gets out. People may like it or not, but you

Two side effects of RSS are an initially-limited visual aesthetic and a temporary loss of individual user tracking; neither of these affects your message, for those who read the content as opposed to presentation.

I do, however, quite enjoy the variety of looks I see when I go to leave comments, or to bookmark something for future use; a world devoid of appearance would be too bland. Thank you all for keeping it so interesting.
5 Jon Gales Jan 17th, 2004 at 1:41 pm

I agree with Jason. Commercial sites are not going to have full text RSS feeds. That’s just not smart.
6 pete Jan 17th, 2004 at 4:27 pm

I’m too am torn between my desire to offer full posts, and the needs of an organization who expects visitors to come to the site to see the site and accompanying banner ads…

Right now I’ve introduced a feed with an excerpt rather than full text, and in the future we’ll determine how much farther we can push things. We’ll also be looking at how our content can be distributed within the confines of individual writers contracts and licenses…

Interesting times ahead.
7 Richard Soderberg Jan 17th, 2004 at 6:15 pm

Unfortunately, excerpt-only feeds often lose me as a reader, simply because I don’t have the connectivity to chase down the full article.

I haven’t clicked a banner ad for several years now, so it’s not as if I would have been a source of revenue, either

Thus, for my use case, no benefit is reaped by publishing excerpt-only; not only is the banner ad revenue lost (from the start), but now my attention is, too.

Where do you stand on the scale of “profit” to “communication”? I’m a communication purist; I respect that many aren’t.
8 Jon Gales Jan 18th, 2004 at 2:00 pm

Richard: My publisher half wants to not care that you don’t read. You’re just an expense. That’s probably because I do CPC not CPM.
9 Richard Soderberg Jan 19th, 2004 at 7:45 am

Hm. I suppose the “income” that results from my attention to all these blogs is unmeasurable in the form of currency; have I commented enough to balance out the cost of the bandwidth I’ve used?